Sunday, August 28, 2016

New Research Lab and Resources


I have a new research lab! As space has tightened requiring the repurposing of previous spaces, my former lab which had plumbing and the requisite safety shower and eye-wash is being taken over by one of my colleagues – it is now being renovated to install a sink, bench space, and other things you would need in a wet lab. As a computational chemist, all I need is power and ports for my workstations. So I’ve moved into a new space that does not have the plumbing lines. Renovations started in late June and were completed last week!

On Thursday, with the help of colleagues, we moved in furniture and a number of workstations and a local Linux server. By the end of the day we had the server and four client machines up and running, which is sufficient to get my research students started. Classes start this coming week, and my students are returning this weekend. Besides returning research students, I have one new student joining my lab who is coming in bright and early on Monday morning at 8am to start learning the ropes!

As with any move, there are always a few hitches. The server has some sort of display problem – it boots up fine, and then at some point in the process the screen goes blank on the attached monitor. Also one of the hard drives on the server failed, but because I have RAID, everything still runs fine. I will need to replace the hard drive otherwise another failure could cause some problems. Some of the new ports were inactive, which was a bit annoying because we had to plug into each one to check those that can be used. The very helpful IT person is working with the networking and telecom folks to make sure all those get activated.

On Friday I was able to set up an account for my new student on three different systems. Besides the local server and clients in my lab, I have access to two other computational clusters located in a server room in a different building. The local machines are mainly terminals for my students to work although it does have one useful piece of software (Spartan) for students to build molecules. It is very user-friendly and we also use it throughout the curriculum starting from the very first semester of college chemistry. Students need a molecular perspective! (We have exercises that utilize molecular modeling on the computer, but students also construct hand-held molecules with kits.)

The two other clusters are the main workhorse programs. Students connect (ssh) to them for production runs. One of the clusters was first built when I started my tenure track position. I started with a server and four nodes, and over the years added more nodes (1U servers into a rack mount), and maybe six years ago I got a new server with more disk space. It’s not fancy, but it was economical and gets the job done. For the newer cluster started I partnered with the IT department – we pooled funds to start a blade server system. The plan is for this to be a university-wide resource where we the users pool our resources. That system came up in January, and we will be doubling our hardware resources this upcoming semester.

So the other thing I had to do on Friday was update the training materials for my new student who is starting on Monday. Most things are the same – we start with a Unix tutorial, followed by learning a text editor (vi), and then move on to using the specific computational software. However, the job submission process for the two clusters is different. On my older cluster, exclusively used by my group (and paid for by my grants), we don’t have a queueing system. Everyone gets in the habit of checking the load across the nodes, and not submitting more jobs then there are processors on a single node. The new one uses Torque/Moab so students will have to get used to that too. (I have job submission scripts written.) The other thing a new student finds confusing is keeping track of where they are now that they have three accounts (rather than two), one for each cluster system, including the local one in the lab.

Anyway, I’m excited for the new semester research-wise. I’m in the midst of writing an NSF RUI proposal, although I still have funding on another award through the end of 2017. For me, proposal writing starts off as a drag, and then after a few days I get excited about the new things I’m proposing. I’m not sure why it’s a drag when I start off. Probably because I don’t write them often enough (a side-benefit of not needing as many resources and having landed almost all the grants I’ve submitted, fingers crossed for this next one!) so it feels a bit “unproductive” because I’m not churning out results. Then again, I get a similar feeling when writing papers, which I do much more often than grants, so maybe it’s a productivity thing. Or maybe there’s a secret fear of being “judged” by one’s peers. (I certainly don’t feel a conscious fear.) Or maybe it’s because I’m not working directly with the students when I’m writing. Or maybe because I’m not a good writer. Well, part of starting this blog was to try and improve. We’ll see if that works!

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Gamification and Credentialing


I enjoy games. The ones I find most interesting tend to be longer and more complex. A strong theme and narrative arc are attractive features. I have enjoyed many hours moving counters on a board, rolling dice, playing cards, back when I had more time, and I could find others with the time and inclination. Avalon Hill games such as Civilization, Age of Renaissance and History of the World, lie dormant in their boxes. Previously, I reviewed Mark Carnes’ book Minds on Fire about using Reacting to the Past simulations in mainly college-level history courses. When done well, an immersive game can be highly engaging and foster, not just learning, but the enlarging of one’s world-view.

Gamification in education, therefore, seems like a good thing at first glance – but I suppose the devil is in the details. The advance in computer games creating immersive worlds is nothing short of astounding. I stopped playing computer games in the early ‘90s essentially with Sid Meier’s Civilization. (Doing most of your work on a computer made me look for other forms of recreation, leading to a renaissance in boardgaming for me.) Games, especially the more open-ended ones, can be a seedbed of creativity and inventiveness. We humans also seem to be drawn to solving puzzles, be it Sudoku, Crosswords, or finding secret artifacts in a dungeon-maze in any number of computer games.

Credentialing, especially in the form of digital badges, is a current hot topic in higher education – with new emerging companies getting into the assessment game. When big money is involved, and the federal government shows interest, you can bet on a rush for the new digital “gold”. I had not thought about the connection between gamification and credentialing until stumbling across this article by Jeff Watson on media commons. It’s from 2013 before the gold rush, so it’s a little unnerving to read his warnings from three years ago, and compare them to what is happening today. The title of his post is “Gamification: Don’t say it, don’t do it, just stop.”

The heart of the problem is control. Instead of fostering creativity, Watson paints it as becoming more regimented. “A game is about the unexpected. Gamification is about the expected, the known, the badgeable, and the quantifiable… It’s about checking in and being tracked… It’s a surveillance and discipline system…” with the goal to “create compliant employees, students, consumers, or citizens”. This is the antithesis of the liberal arts – to give our students the “skills” (what the “arts” actually means) to live freely and fully (what the “liberal” means).

A good game is not a free-for-all. It has some constraints, which in fact act as aids (by some measures) to sparking creativity and inventiveness. Watson praises game design, but has harsh words for gamification: “This is not a recipe for creating the kinds of creative problem-solvers our civilization needs. This is a recipe for creating rule-followers who are more concerned with optimizing their badge collections than with truly exploring and engaging with the world in which they live.”

Instead of trying to truly buck the system (which may be too difficult), education has lurched from one credentialing system to another. Most recently, the disillusionment with grade inflation and rising GPAs becoming “seemingly meaningless”, there was a call for the portfolio instead of letter grades. But in an era of massification, the “system” requires some sort of standardization – in the name of justice and fairness, but perhaps hiding the fact that this is simply the requirement of an advancing technological system that counts in bits and bytes. Digital badging is the quick way for your portfolio to be quickly searchable and accessible, supposedly opening you up to new opportunities and linking you into a wider network, but also sinisterly keeping track of you. Welcome to the Brave New World of conformity masquerading as disruption.

Saturday, August 20, 2016

The Problem of Acceleration


I finished Book 5 of Jasper Fforde’s “Thursday Next Series” interestingly titled First Among Sequels. (There’s a good reason for it in the story!) I’ve enjoyed this series because there’s a strong blend of science and literature, not to mention large doses of wry humor, weaved throughout the narrative. (It also fittingly has an amusing sub-index.) The story also moves at a good pace, making it one of those hard-to-put-down books. For an overview of the first several books, here’s an earlier post after I finished the first three books.

Today I’d like to highlight a few of the science-y parts by quoting a few passages. Then I’m going to discuss one of the core issues brought up by the book, the problem of “Short-Termism”, something quite relevant to our ever accelerating pace of life today.

The first quote is on the nature of ghosts, spoken by a phantom ever-curious inventor-scientist, as the temperature of the room drops. “A phantom is essentially a heteromorphic wave pattern that gains solidity when the apparition converts thermal energy from the surroundings to visible light. It’s a fascinating process, and I’m amazed no one has thought of harnessing it – a holographic TV that could operate from the heat given off by an average-size guinea pig.”

The next quote is a discussion of the “Schrodinger Night Fever principle”. I’ve truncated some parts to keep it short but kept the original italics in the quotes. “Many things happen solely because of the curious human foible of a preconceived notion’s alternating the outcome… If you go to see Saturday Night Fever expecting it to be good, it’s a corker. However, if you go expecting it to be a crock of shit, it’s that, too. Thus Saturday Night Fever can exist in two mutually opposing states at the very same time, yet only by the weight of our expectations…” After being asked whether the principle works with any John Travolta movie, the explainer continues: “Only the artistically ambiguous ones such as Pulp Fiction and Face/Off. Battlefield Earth doesn’t work because it’s a stinker no matter how much you think you’re going to like it, and Get Shorty doesn’t work either, because you’d be hard-pressed not to enjoy it, irrespective of any preconceived notion.”

I might use the quote in my Quantum class this upcoming semester, although it would probably have worked much better ten years ago – not sure if the students are familiar with all these movies. There’s another part that links the Second Law of Thermodynamics to the invention of time travel via the discovery of the equations constituting the recipe for unscrambled eggs. That will have to wait until the spring semester when I teach thermodynamics again.

[Warning: Book spoilers in the next paragraph.]

Littered throughout the book are references to the government trying to come up with ways to spend down the “stupidity surplus”. It builds up, and you have to spend it down by coming up with hare-brained projects, otherwise a sudden release could become catastrophic. It’s more prominent here than in the previous books because one of the core issues that reveals itself towards the end of the book is how time travel is powered. The organization known as the ChronoGuard essentially are mining the present time (or the “Now”) for their time-jumping activities. This has caused a shortening of the Now that will “spell the gradual collapse of forward planning, and mankind will slowly strangulate itself in a downward spiral of uncaring self-interest and short-term instant gratification.” This increasing Short-Termism reveals itself partly in the alarming falling rates of readership. “The Short Now would hate books; too much thought required for not enough gratification.” The 2006 movie Idiocracy is a good example of what this dystopia might look like. (While I checked the internet to find out the year the movie was released, I came across a very recent article where the director muses how scary it is to see similar behavior just ten years later, referring to the present political circus.)

I certainly don’t think my students have gotten stupider in the last ten years. The average capability may have even gone up slightly, if you’re using SAT/ACT scores as a measure. What I do see, however, is a distribution moving from normal to bimodal. The high-achieving students are really impressive; the low-end students (by this I mean academic grade-wise) don’t have the desire and interest to put in the time and energy. I’ve seen more withdrawals in recent years compared to when I first started teaching. (I don’t think the students are unintelligent, but they do have different priorities.) But more alarmingly I see increased stress levels all across the board, more so at the high-achieving end. The fear of failure (sometimes defined by the student as not getting an “A”) is palpable. Their lives seem so busy, so compressed, as they run around in a frenzy of activity – not just on the academic end, but also in the extra-curricular. They don’t give themselves the opportunity to slow down and think in the deep and broad sense; but that’s because society-at-large does discourages it.

Witness the assault on the humanities and the liberal arts in favor of narrow job skills needed for the here and now, less you end up jobless and laden with student debt. But defenders of the liberal arts have not done any better with their brand of fear-mongering: The jobs of today will not be the jobs of tomorrow! Society is changing at a rapid pace! You need critical thinking, a broad skill set, adaptability, leadership! Not that these are bad things, but it is no wonder that the frenzy credential-chasing frenzy continues. And how do you blow off steam in our fast-paced society? Though the Binge, of course. You can binge Neflix, binge alcohol, binge eat; everything is done in a frenzy of excess. Witness the growth in student services in the last twenty years. Professors are doing no better as role models as the pressures pile on. I am alarmed by the stress I observe in new assistant professors, akin to what I see in top-notch students. Everything needs to be done here and now so you need to be Efficient! Short-termism has permeated the academy, just as it has the business world, political structures, and the entertainment industry.

But where does all this come from? I don’t think it comes because time travel has been invented (although First Among Sequels explores this in a very clever way). I suspect that the philosopher Jacques Ellul may be on to something when he discusses the tyranny of the all-consuming technological system. The system’s imperative is to continue improving efficiency, streamlining and accelerating communication, providing feedback loops, evolving (as it were) into a complex organism – maybe an ecosystem. But unlike the ‘natural’ ecosystem, it seems to be moving further from equilibrium – at least from the perspective of humans. We are increasingly dis-equilibrated in this new world.

Can we as a society free ourselves from this tyranny? What makes it particularly difficult is that the cost to an individual or a small group to opt out of the system is huge, unless it has sufficient resources to do so. I’d like to free my courses of grades and GPAs, in an effort to reduce student stress and change baseline motivations, but it is embedded in a much larger credentialing system far beyond my university or even simply the set of tertiary education institutes. There was an attempt in our most recent core curriculum revision to reduce the overall number of units a student needed to graduate, but that failed. There are Assessments, Accreditations, and other Accountabilities to worry about.

I’m not sure how to slow down this Acceleration, and to help students move away from Short-Termism. Perhaps I could start by being a good role model, and start by consciously giving more time to my students. I feel that, over time, as I took on more administrative duties, I might have given my students the impression that I have less time for them. It’s challenging to maintain a high level of teaching excellence, research activity, and be a good ‘servant’ to the institution. So one of my goals this semester is to make a conscious effort not to be rushed when I am with students. (I’m sure they pick up the subtle cues.) I’m not sure how I will achieve this as I’m also trying to get an NSF grant out the door, among other things that are already piling up as the beginning of the semester approaches. We haven’t even started the actual semester yet! I wonder what the Zen secret is that counters Acceleration.

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Scaffolding a Final Project


Classes start in a couple of weeks, and I am going to take the plunge by incorporating “Inventing a New Element” as a final project. The initial idea and scope of the project was discussed in an earlier post. I haven’t fleshed out the exact assignment details, but I have been thinking about how to scaffold the project over the course of the semester. The scaffolding idea came out of weekly discussions with one of my colleagues – we both decided to take a stab at “creativity in chemistry” and do something in at least one of our classes in the upcoming semester.

For a number of years, when I meet my first-year students in General Chemistry, I ask them what is their favorite element in the periodic table and why. The responses range from trite to elaborately-thought-out. (There is some time for reflection and staring at a periodic table beforehand.) I think I will do this again, but am thinking of adding an Elements Report assignment due after two weeks of classes. By that point we would have covered basics about elements, atoms, molecules, compounds, subatomic particles, and some nuclear chemistry. Students will pick an element and report on its characteristic properties, history of discovery, how it is found in nature, uses, and maybe how it can be purified. Originally I was thinking of a written report, but maybe it could be an Infographic project.

A week or so later I'm planning to try out a modified version of my Alien Periodic Table discovery activity that gives students a sense of how (difficult it is) to come up with an organizing principle when you have a bunch of data that may pull you in different directions. Not only that, it is incomplete, and you don’t quite know which data is valuable or possibly erroneous. As modern techniques allow one to probe into atomic structure, an organizational principle begins to emerge. While this involves lots of in-class activity, the assignment I am planning is a written reflection. The idea is to have students engage in a meta-cognitive assessment of all that activity (some of which will be quite frustrating, but in a good way).

About two-thirds into the semester when I’ve finished chemical bonding (ionic, covalent, metallic), the plan is to have another assignment where the students dream up new compounds by combining different elements, to some extent stretching the limits of reality, and try to make some predictions on the properties of their exotic creations. At this point we will also have discussed the properties of solids, and several other macroscopic bulk properties. This will hopefully then lead into the final project on the Invention of a New Element. I’m thinking of dividing them into scientific teams, and they write a proposal of a new element they would like to create, what its properties would be (including how it would interact with known elements), and to justify their choice. The written proposal will lead to a poster session where groups will present their results. I haven’t decided whether there should be a final paper.

Being in a system motivated by grades, one of the things I will have to do is adjust my typical graded assignment percentages, so the project and its scaffolding activities will be a decent chunk of the grade. Concomitantly, I should reduce the percentage going to exams (typically 80-85% in the past). I will also need a bit more class time for additional activities in class to support the scaffolding. Therefore my current idea is to turn the usual mid-semester in-class exams into take-home exams that are very low stakes (2% full marks given just for taking the exam). The students will be instructed to take them timed and closed-book as a self-test. (Self-testing was given a high relative utility in a recent paper.) I think they won’t “cheat” because there will still be an in-class two-hour Final Exam worth at least a third of the course grade. So they would be motivated to replicate exam conditions (albeit not in the same physical classroom) without penalty to their grade. I will of course provide comments when I “grade” these. My plan is to have four of them, the first one an hour long, and then adding 15, 30 and 45 minutes to the next three. This helps the student build up stamina and also allows me more flexibility to integrate material in the exam.

Regular readers of my blog will know that parts of this strategy are not new. Over a year ago, I made an attempt to do many of these things along with trying to de-emphasize grades and move students towards intrinsic motivation. That met with mixed success. This time around I think I am more cognizant not to overload the students, and I see this as an improved iteration with some new aspects, but also scaled down in other areas that I learned were over-ambitious. We’ll see how this goes!

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Effective Learning Techniques?


August is here! With that comes a shift in priorities and time usage. I was able to submit a research manuscript earlier this week, and start some preliminary work on a grant proposal to be submitted in the fall. But classes start at the end of this month, and so teaching occupies more of my thoughts these days. I was able to read several papers on learning and cognitive psychology this summer, so here’s a summary of one on “effective learning techniques”. For the source, here’s a snapshot with the relevant citation info.

The authors analyzed and evaluated ten learning techniques. There is a scorecard of sorts at the end of the paper summarizing strengths/weaknesses and where more research is needed. The paper itself is a lot more nuanced, but let’s jump to the soundbyte conclusion first, before I discuss the criteria and some salient points from the study. The ten techniques and their “relative utility” are:

·      Elaborative interrogation: Moderate
·      Self-explanation: Moderate
·      Summarization: Low
·      Highlighting: Low
·      Keyword Mmemonic: Low
·      Imagery for Text Learning: Low
·      Re-reading: Low
·      Practice Testing: High
·      Distributed Practice: High
·      Interleaved Practice: Moderate

One very useful aspect of this study is that multiple useful criteria are applied to determine that final “relative utility” rating, and the authors are clear about the caveats and limitations of their analysis. For example, they look at how applicable a method may be across different age groups, the type and breadth of the materials used, the actual tasks asked of the “users”, whether the context closely resembled actual educational contexts, and more. Although the information on each technique was synthesized from multiple studies, key representative examples along with data are shown. (This is a clear and well-written paper!)

Hence, a technique may receive an overall low utility rating not because it is a lousy method, but because it may not transfer well across different contexts, or its effects are small compared to others, or if there was simply insufficient evidence and more is needed. For example, interleaved practice seems to show some gains, but has the fewest studies and so how general and widely it applies is still an open question. I am not surprised to see that highlighting and re-reading have low overall utility even though they are go-to techniques for students. (This says something about educating students in more effective ways to “study”.) They are better than not doing anything, but less optimal – certainly for learning concepts in chemistry!

Practice Testing is one of the high utility methods. The word “practice” is important because this refers to either low or no-stakes tests, and student-generated self-tests. The other high utility method is Distributed Practice, basically spreading out the learning and not cramming at the last minute. I tell students this, but perhaps I should show them the graph below. (This study by Bahrick was on translation of Spanish words.) The final test 30 days after the last practice session is rather telling. The authors also summarize that a useful rule-of-thumb is that “criterion performance was best when the lag between sessions was approximately 10-20% of the desired retention interval.” To remember something four months apart, it’s good to practice every three weeks or so. I’d like to think that’s why in some classes I give exams every three weeks, but that was not how I came to such a practice.

Learning is complex. One limitation of many of the studies is that criterion tasks for recall vary greatly both by type (what is asked and how) and by timing (how long, how frequent). Another is that the strategies for how students implement a particular technique also varies – and there are often other compounding factors that affect one’s “performance”. It is not easy to tease out the effects of one particular technique in isolation. Many of the studies are not surprisingly tested on college students (often in introductory psychology classes) but there are a fair number on children of different ages and a few on adult learners. Subject matter is also a potential problem. Some of the tasks may be trivial and/or irrelevant to the desire of the learner. (Frank Smith would say this is the “nonsense” approach.) However, it was nice to see a few studies that were carried out in actual real-life educational contexts (the results are also messier), as opposed to lab-test-like conditions.

By far, the hardest issue to isolate, and which affects the majority of studies, is the learner’s prior knowledge and motivation. A number of studies that showed gains for a particular technique showed more gains for students at the “higher end” of the scale. Whether this was because they already had more background (or “domain”) knowledge, were more interested in the topic, had actually utilized other learning techniques or simply were more practiced in certain areas, it was hard to tell. I think this says something about the holistic nature of learning. Any technique is limited by the background of the learner, and his/her relationship with learning (in all its facets that may not be easily separable). There is no one size fits all, or even most. This also means that one cannot make significant efficient gains through the increase in technology and massification of education – at least if quality is to be retained. (Caveat: Unless we all become robots!)

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Augmented Reality


It’s been interesting watching the phenomenon that is Pokemon Go, especially as it spread through Latin America and Asia this past week. I find it amusing that the Japan release only came after Australia, North America and Europe. This, combined with watching the CGI projections at the Olympics opening ceremony, made me think about augmented reality.

I haven’t personally seen hordes of folks walking around staring at their cellphones, but maybe because I’m not going to the right places. In Pokemon Go, players can “see” something that non-players cannot. It first reminded me of the thestrals in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; only some students can see them, but they are invisible to others. But there’s a difference: the thestrals can be sensed in other ways by those who cannot physically see them, but the creatures of Pokemon Go are un-sensible or non-sensible to non-players. So a better analogy might be the divide between magic users and non-magic users. Magic users can sense magic, like Jedi can sense the Force. Non-users simply do not have that experience.

In previous posts, I mused about virtual reality as a window to experience a magical world. One could also go the theme park route with the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. (I have yet to plan a trip – I’m waiting for the crowds to die down post-summer – and the new L.A. park is much closer to me than Orlando.) Alternatively one could experience several days in a LARP format. I think New World Magischola have prudently chosen not to go the route of Harry Potter licensing, instead creating their own school and houses (but basically the same idea).

Here’s my new (potentially commercial) idea: Use a combination of live action with both virtual and augmented reality. Instead of having to build a theme park, one could use any nondescript building – a warehouse if you want more space, or on a smaller scale a shop in a mall. Use augmented reality to “help” users find these “places of magic”. It’s somewhat like St Mungo’s or the Ministry of Magic – hidden to Muggle eyes, but has traces of magic identifiable to a wizard. I’m not sure a hospital or a government building would be as interesting as a bazaar when you can actually buy objects (after all, you’ll need to recoup your investment by setting this up) or a place where you can have an adventure (like those popular escape rooms, or maybe on open grounds somewhere).

While Google Glass looked dorky when it first came out, I’m sure someone out there is designing something that will look sleek so that you can have a smooth augmented reality experience outdoors. If you are going somewhere indoors, a combination of virtual reality, augmented reality and “real” stuff (because you might want to actually handle physical objects) can be blended. I could imagine an indoor shop selling magical objects (maybe with a program that links to your augmented reality device), which you could then use in other adventures. One could bring Dungeons and Dragons to augmented life. I could also imagine an outdoor space where you could hunt a beast or find treasure (like Pokemon Go) with adequate mapping and preparation of the location.

Another consideration is whether to go with something the public already knows, probably requiring licensing fees proportional to its popularity. (I wonder how much Wizarding World of Harry Potter had to pay in terms of licensing fees.) Or create your own world, and try not to infringe on copyright. If you’re successful, the corporate world will come after you to protect their interests. I could happily work on someone devise a theory of magic to interact with virtual, augmented, and physical devices. But I’m not sure I’ll leave my day job just yet. I’m sure someone has thought of this idea already and is working on it, if not multiple people.

I also wonder about the longer term psychological effects of immersing oneself in an augmented reality that does not “physically” exist. Before the technology existed, we might indulge a very young child who plays in an imaginary world, but we would think the adult crazy and psychologically unstable. But one thing I’m pretty sure will happen is that we will continue to push this technology to its limits for better or for worse.

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Fabricating a Theory of Learning


This is the second part of a series highlighting Frank Smith’s The Book of Learning and Forgetting. In the first part, we covered the ‘classic’ view, and we will now look at the ‘official’ view – its roots and its problems.

How did the classic view shift to the official view? Here’s what the author thinks. “The justification for change was – as it still is – efficiency, as defined by some external authority. People of influence thought pupils weren’t learning very much during their time in school [the model being the one-room schoolhouse]; pupils seemed to do what they liked while they were there, and their teachers didn’t appear to have much control over them. There was a total lack of organization – and organization was what enabled western industrialization to take off in the nineteenth century. This was the age when management, drawing on science and technology, seemed capable of solving any problem.”

Reading this, it occurs to me that much of how I structure my workday relates to the three terms in italics: efficiency, organization, management. And the way I have measured my improvement has often been in these terms. I think this subconscious hewing to efficiency belies a greater problem, but a complex one for which there might be no easy solution.

In any case, Smith continues: “There was a search for a model of what schools (and teachers and students) should be like. And one was found. The model was nothing than the mightiest fighting machine in Europe, the Prussian army.” Instead of a haphazard recruitment and training strategy, they “selected recruits of the same age, height, weight, and experience, put them into separate barracks, subjected them to remorseless discipline and drill, threw out the ones who couldn’t make it, and forged a totally standardized, predictable and reliable product – the Prussian soldier.”

This may be the crux that efficiency forces upon us – standardization of parts so as to reliably fit into a working system. As the complexity increases (inevitable with growth), more parts need to be interlocked more smoothly into the integrated whole. This brings with it increasing potential for crisis – where one screw-up could bring down the system – thereby requiring further complexity through engineering fail-safe mechanisms and further devices. The explosive growth of student services in universities is perhaps one sign of what is happening in the higher education sector. How do we “help” the mass of students get through to the product (degree completion)? How can we monitor (via data analytics) how they are doing in all aspects so that intervention can take place where necessary?

The author points out interesting parallels in the jargon of education and the military: “We talk of the deployment of resources, the recruitment of teachers and students, advancing or withdrawing students, promotion to higher grades, drills for learners, strategy for teachers, batteries of tests, [attacking a problem], attainment targets, reinforcement, cohorts, campaigns…” Not only that, “it wasn’t just the physical structure of schools that was split into largely meaningless parts. So was time itself. The school day became a grid of ‘periods’ devoted to compartmentalized aspects of learning. And the more difficulty students experienced learning something, the more likely they were to receive more fragmented and disjointed things to learn…” (For an example of doing things differently, here’s a post on the block system – a system nevertheless.)

But unlike the efficient Prussian army, the same barrage of techniques does not seem to have produced efficient results – as we can observe by the constant hand-wringing of promise-making politicians. Who tends to be blamed when a new innovation does not work? Teachers. In the old days, there was an art to good teaching. Now it needed to become a science thereby ushering the reign of the official theory to supercede the classic theory of learning and forgetting.

Chapter 7 shares the same title as this blog post: “Fabricating a Theory of Learning”. I think of fabrication in two senses – a streamlined engineering process as we discussed above, but the word also carries a connotation of an edifice built on a shaky foundation, even a lie. This is the chapter I find the most troubling especially since I have in recent years tried to incorporate a number of things from cognitive science and educational psychology. I’m a scientist after all. What could be better than scientific methods to hone in on ‘best practices’ (a totally overused phrase)?

The author’s most damning critique begins with Herman Ebbinghaus, “an itinerant philosopher who developed an interest in scientific methodology after his military service, with the victorious Prussian army, in the Franco-Prussian war.” He would introduce a method to take scientific measurements of learning and forgetting. The baseline problem is that it is difficult to isolate aspects of learning because there are so many variables between different people (test subjects!) including past experience, interest, home environment, culture, the list goes on. “What experiments need is a method of control (another revealing piece of professional jargon) so that the learning task is fundamentally the same for everyone.”

And that’s how the nonsense syllable was invented. Nonsense? Really? Yes, because when you have something that doesn’t make sense or fit into a prior framework, then you are on the same footing as anyone else and presumably would learn in the same way. What is the measurement tool? The clock. You measure time taken – how long it takes to learn and recite a list of nonsense syllabus, and how long it takes to forget such a list. (You also keep a count of number of errors made.) I have reproduced the results in the two curves below.

And what do we “learn” from this? That anyone can learn anything as long as you spent more “time on task”. It is no wonder that students come into my office distraught after an exam given all the time and effort they spent “studying”. (Note that Smith would argue that a regime of tests is misguided in the first place.) It’s also no wonder that the next semester, very little is remembered from the previous semester in the prerequisite class. Easy come, easy go – at least if the students did not really make much sense of the material, certainly at a deeper level. That’s why cramming is a short-term strategy. If your goal is to just pass a particular test, then this might work. But if it is to learn, that’s a different story.

While building on an edifice of nonsense is scary, things gets worse. Smith argues that the reason such “laws of learning” were adopted, mainly by “people with influence outside the classroom – politicians, bureaucrats and experts” was the seemingly scientific approach that guaranteed results (however you construe this), and that teachers and students lacked organization and/or effort. More perniciously, the official theory allows a semblance of control. Lists to memorize came in. But they needed to be measured with scores. And those had to be kept as records. Sound familiar? That’s what it feels like today to be a teacher – you give scores and keep records. Even worse, it was now possible for students to cheat, by “unfairly” earning scores for themselves or others.

What has suffered are the relationships that underpinned the basis of the classic view of learning. The author writes: “The teacher was no longer the collaborator or even the guide. The teacher became the official in charge of work and the collector of the scores, chained like the students to standardized instructional procedures… Cooperation, which had previously been the key to learning, was driven underground. Students changed in their attitudes toward each other… as they competed at their individualized learning.”

Chapters 8 through 10 expand the thrust of 6 and 7. The inglorious history of testing and its proliferation is examined. This is followed by elevating systems over people, thereby separating the decision-making leaders from the robotic implementers. Logistics reigns. We are reminded of terms familiar to us: time lines, quality control, objectives and of course there’s the ubiquitous task force. A look at job titles and descriptions shows an increase in the use of the word management. Then there’s the subjugation of learning principles to what can be simulated or measured with computers and other instruments – if we can’t consistently measure something scientifically, it is banished to the realm of folklore and anecdote. I won’t elaborate on these: the picture painted is depressing enough.

There is no simple solution to all this. My small take-home lesson for the day, because that’s all I can digest for now, is not to prize efficiency over relationships. Perhaps awareness is the first step to recovery.